In a wireless communication system, as a general rule, it is highly desirable that the minimum radiated radio frequency (RF) carrier power necessary to achieve a specified quality level of communications be used in order to conserve energy and, perhaps more importantly, in order to reduce interference with other users of a shared RF spectrum. With the increasing use of cellular wireless communication systems comprising a base station (BS) at each cell, and remote terminals (a remote terminal also is called a subscriber unit (SU) or a subscriber station) communicating with an assigned base station, the problem of interference between stations within a given cellular area, and between neighboring cells, requires intelligent interference management in order to more effectively use the allocated common RF bandwidth. Such interference management is the goal of power control. As a general rule, the minimum radiated RF power required for maintaining an acceptable quality of service should be used.
Two types of power control are necessary: initial power control, and ongoing power control. In initial power control, the goal is to initiate communications with the minimal level of power necessary to achieve an acceptable level of communications. Ongoing power control maintains minimum transmitted power usage on a link as the communication system changes over time by new links being formed while others are being established.
Initial Power Control
Several communications protocols are known for cellular systems, including, for example, the Personal Handiphone System (PHS) and the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). Both use time division multiple access (TDMA) together with frequency division multiple access (FDMA) techniques. Such communications protocols all include protocols for call establishment, for example for a subscriber unit initiating communications to a BS, or a BS initiating communications with a SU. Some of these protocols may not include initial power control. There thus is a need in the art for an initial power control method that may be applied to an existing communication system without adversely impacting communication system protocols that are in existence.
Ongoing Power Control
Ongoing power control is the control of radiated power as the communication environment changes after initial communications is achieved. For example, when the radiated power is increased in a particular link between a SU and a BS in order to achieve an acceptable quality for the received signal, or for some other reason, such a change may cause unacceptable quality changes for other stations using either the same or adjacent channels. In addition, as new connections are established and on-going connections are disconnected, power assignments might change resulting in changes (for better or worse) in the quality of existing connections. For example, “excess quality” may result, implying that excess RF power is being used under the new conditions. Degraded quality also may be experienced, implying that some connections may require greater radiated RF power. Variations in propagation characteristics, atmospherics, and man-made interference can also cause changes that require adjusting RF power levels. This is the goal of ongoing power control.
Spatial division multiple access (SDMA) techniques are known in which the same “conventional channel” (i.e., the same frequency channel in a frequency division multiple access (FDMA) system, timeslot in a time division multiple access (TDMA) system, code in a code division multiple access (CDMA) system, or timeslot and frequency in a TDMA/FDMA system) may be assigned to more than one subscriber station. This is done by using an antenna array of several antenna elements at the base station, and on the uplink (communications from a subscriber unit to a base station), the signal from each antenna element is weighted in amplitude and phase by a receive weight (also called spatial demultiplexing weight), all the receive weights determining a complex valued receive weight vector which is dependent on the receive spatial signature of the remote user. The receive spatial signature (also called the receive manifold vector) characterizes how the base station array receives signals from a particular subscriber unit. On the downlink (communications from the base station unit to a subscriber unit), transmission is achieved by weighting the signal to be transmitted by each array element in amplitude and phase by a set of respective transmit weights (also called spatial multiplexing weights), all the transmit weights for a particular user determining a complex-valued transmit weight vector which also is dependent on the spatial signature of the remote user. When transmitting to several remote users on the same conventional channel, the sum of weighted signals is transmitted at the antenna arrays.
The weighting of the signals either on the uplink from each antenna element in an array of antennas, or on the downlink to each antenna element is called spatial processing herein. Spatial processing is useful even when no more than one subscriber unit is assigned to any conventional channel. Thus, the term SDMA shall be used herein to include both the true spatial multiplexing case of having more than one user per conventional channel, and the use of spatial processing with only one user per conventional channel to mitigate adjacent channel interference and adjacent cell interference, reduce the cellular frequency reuse factor, etc. The term channel shall refer to a communications link between a base station and a single remote user, so that the term SDMA covers both a single channel per conventional channel, and more than one channel per conventional channel.
Methods for determining spatial receive and transmit weight vectors are known in the art. See for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,515,378 (issued May 7, 1996) and U.S. Pat. No. 5,642,353 (issued Jun. 24, 1997) entitled SPATIAL DIVISION MULTIPLE ACCESS WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, Roy, III, et al., inventors; U.S. Pat. No. 5,592,490 (issued Jan. 7, 1997) entitled SPECTRALLY EFFICIENT HIGH CAPACITY WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, Barratt, et al., inventors; U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/735,520 (filed Oct. 10, 1996), entitled SPECTRALLY EFFICIENT HIGH CAPACITY WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS WITH SPATIO-TEMPORAL PROCESSING, Ottersten, et al., inventors; U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/729,390 (filed Oct. 11, 1996) entitled METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR DECISION DIRECTED DEMODULATION USING ANTENNA ARRAYS AND SPATIAL PROCESSING, Barratt, et al., inventors (hereinafter “Our Demodulation Patent”); and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/948,772 (filed Oct. 10, 1997) entitled METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CALIBRATING A WIRELESS COMMUNICATION STATION HAVING AN ANTENNA ARRAY, Parish, et al., inventors (hereinafter “Our Calibration Patent”), each of these incorporated herein by reference in their entirety, these patents or applications collectively referred to herein as “Our Spatial Processing Patents”. For example, in systems that use time division duplexing (TDD) so that uplink and downlink communications occurs over the same frequency (in a FDMA or a TDMA/FDMA system), a receive weight vector of receive weights determined on the uplink can be used to determine the required transmit weight vector of transmit weights for communications on the downlink from the base station to the same remote subscriber unit.
No practical methods of ongoing power control are known in the prior art that are applicable to systems using SDMA techniques, in that the power control methods can effectively adjust all of the SDMA system parameters required for minimizing the total radiated RF power while maintaining acceptable quality levels for all channels. Using SDMA introduces substantial complexities in the RF radiated power control problem because determining weight vectors affects power control, and vice versa. Any change in RF power on a conventional channel using SDMA will affect the transmit and receive weight vectors assigned to users using the same conventional channel and any change in the spatial processing effects the power required by existing users in order to maintain an adequate communication quality level. Prior art methods for power control typically do not account for the specific aspects of SDMA, and may cause instability in such an SDMA system, wherein an improper choice of transmit power adversely alters the spatial multiplexing (i.e., transmit) and demultiplexing (i.e., receive) weight vectors, causing the transmit powers to deviate further from optimum until signal quality and network capacity are both degraded.
The optimal solution of the ongoing power control problem for an SDMA system requires the simultaneous solution of the SDMA multiplexing weight assignment problem and the power assignment problem. This at the very least is an involved computational task, and to date has been an intractable and overwhelming computational task. Thus there is a need in the art for a practical near optimal method for determining spatial processing weight vectors and ongoing power control for an SDMA system.
The objective of ongoing power control problems for communications is to minimize the total power transmitted in the communication system while ensuring that a desired (“target”) signal to interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for every connection within every cell is achieved. When expressed in this way, the resulting power control method is referred to as a globally optimal method. Such a globally optimal method in general requires communications between base stations of the system. Locally optimal methods are those for which optimality is satisfied within some subset of the overall system, for example, within a particular cell. There may be practical difficulties with directly determining a globally optimal method when dealing with a large number of intercell and intracell connections. For example, the computation time may be too long relative to the rate of change of connection conditions; and, it may not be feasible or practical to gather the necessary data, such as the path gain between every base station and every remote subscriber unit in real time. It has been shown (Yun, L. C. M., Transport for Multimedia on Wireless Networks, Doctoral Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, Calif., 1995) for a non-SDMA system that, by incorporating the effects of interference coupling between cells, the localized control strategy can be made to asymptotically converge to the globally optimal solution. Thus there are advantages to having an ongoing power control strategy that uses locally optimal power control. Thus there is a need in the art for locally optimal power control methods for systems with SDMA that are “distributed,” in that no inter-base station communication of power control information is required for operation.
Signal Quality Estimation
In order to implement power control, an objective measure of the quality of the received signal is required. It is generally accepted that a measure of the error in the signal is a useful objective measure of quality. It is desirable that any such measurement of error be made while normal communications are taking place.
Several prior art methods exist for estimating the quality of received signal. One class or prior art techniques uses a measure of the received signal power as a measure of the received signal quality. An example is the commonly used received signal strength indicator (RSSI). The problem with such measures is that they do not distinguish between the desired signal and any interfering signals and/or noise. To overcome this shortcoming, some prior art power control methods use a measure of the bit error rate (BER) or the easier to obtain frame error rate (FER). For example, the initial power control method used in the IS-95 CDMA standard uses FER. FER is easier to obtain in practice than the BER because cyclic redundancy check (CRC) bits usually are part of a frame structure. The FER may be viewed as an approximate indication of the BER. Two main shortcomings of BER and FER as measures include:                1. It takes a long time (many frames) to accumulate a statistically meaningful estimate of BER or FER, which may be too slow for power control; and        2. The BER (or FER) may not be only a function of power, but may also be affected by other causes of a demodulation error. For example, residual frequency offset (even after any frequency offset correction has been applied) may contribute to the modulation error.        
Additionally, prior-art decision-directed modulation error estimation methods exist which have used for quality estimation an error vector that represents the difference between the received signal and an idealized model of the signal that should have been received. The idealized model is generated from the detected bits by passing the detected bits through a bits-to-symbol mapper which converts the bits to the correct symbols, and then passing the correct symbols through a pulse shaper to produce the idealized model of the signal (a reference signal). The pulse shaper also needs to undo frequency correction and undo timing alignment. The difference between the resulting idealized model of the modulated signal (with any frequency offset and timing misalignment) and the actual received signal is used to estimate the noise and interference present in the actual signal, and this is used as a quality estimate.
This prior-art decision based quality estimator has several undesirable properties, some similar to the BER and FER measures:                1. a demodulation error may cause a large error in the quality estimate by substituting an incorrect symbol in place of the actual symbol that was meant to be transmitted;        2. frequency offset contributes to the modulation error;        3. measurement of modulation error does not directly relate to the RF carrier strength and to the noise and interference levels; and        4. estimation of the signal to interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) from the modulation error tends to result in a high variance (unreliable) estimator.        
Note that the sensitivity to frequency offset is particularly undesirable when the quality estimator is for transmitter power control. Increasing the transmitter power because a frequency offset error is mistaken for noise or interference error, is not only completely ineffective, but is undesirable because an unnecessary excess transmitter power will cause increased interference with other system users.
Thus there is a need in the art for power control methods that use a process for estimating the quality of received signal which (a) is fast; (b) is substantially insensitive to frequency offset variations; and (c) leads to a measure, for example the signal to interference-and-noise ratio (SINR), that differentiates signal from interference and noise.